A year ago, on December 1, 2008, I published my first post on this blog. Its title was “Let’s Unmask Parasites“.

Working on Unmask Parasites service, I could easily spot prevalent threats and trends in malware attacks. I used this information to help webmasters of hacked sites on various security-related forums and news groups. However, forum format assumes that you answer similar questions again and again, which is very inefficient. That’s why I decided to publish information about prevalent website security problems here. This way I could write detailed information once and then just link to my articles in my forum answers.

Google Chrome OS

This week Google announced that they are working on a new open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks – Google Chrome OS. That’s right. It’s a Google Chrome browser running on top of Linux kernel. Netbooks running Google Chrome OS should be available in the second half of 2010. (BTW, will European Union rule Google exclude Google Chrome browser from the default installation of a Google Chrome OS? )

They are going to completely redesign the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. As far as I understand the concept, everything should be stored and executed on the web, so traditional malware won’t work on such a OS. On the other hand, I envision criminals somehow make Chrome users subscribe to their malicious web services.Continue »»

To have more things under my control I moved this blog from a shared hosting plan to a VPS (virtual private server).

However, when I imported WordPress posts to the new location, things didn’t go as expected and the structure of threaded comments got broken. When you read popular posts with active discussions, you might not be able to identify who responding to whom. In new posts, threaded comments should be working. Continue »»

Yesterday, I had been notified that my blog’s web pages sometimes contain malicious scripts. I had to shut down the blog and investigate the issue. Sorry for the inconvenience. I didn’t want to expose you to any threats.

Gumblar is dead

Many people have noticed that “gumblar .cn” no longer resolve. The site cannot be accessed. Thus the gumblar script is no longer able to load the malicious payload and infect new computers and websites. Great!

Meet the Martuz

The loss of the gumblar .cn domain name can’t stop hackers. They have slightly modified the script and now inject a new version that loads malicious content from a new domain – martuz .cn (95 .129 .145 .58)Continue »»

The Gumblar exploit seems to be the biggest exploit I’ve ever reviewed in my blog. About a thousand visitors come to read my article about Gumblar every day. This exploit accounts for about 80% of positives on Unmask Parasites and I still don’t see any sign of its decline.

I found some more interesting facts about this exploit in SophosLab’s and ScanSafe’s blogs and would like to share them with you.Continue »»

BadwareBusters.org is an online community for people looking for help removing viruses, spyware, and other malicious software from their computers and websites. The site is a joint effort of Consumer Reports WebWatch and the StopBadware.org project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

I’ve been a member of this community since early alpha releases last fall. I watched the site evolving from what I called “usability disaster” to a very decent web forum with interesting discussions. Yesterday they finally removed the beta label and officially launched the site.Continue »»

Something strange has happened to Google. All links in search results are marked as harmful. I checked from both Windows and Linux machine so spyware interference is very unlikely. Must be a Google’s bug. Continue »»